The collection (56 boxes and 2 rolls) was moved in 1995 from Dow's Widener Library
Room 690 study to a caged area on Widener stacks level C, then to the Widener room
81; then reboxed in situ and sent to the Depository by the Houghton Library staff
in 2002. It was consolidated into 49 boxes in 2009.

The majority of this collection is not housed at the Houghton Library but is shelved
offsite at the Harvard Depository. Retrieval requires advance notice. Readers should
check with Houghton Public Services staff to determine what material is offsite and
retrieval policies and times.

Sterling Dow was born on November 19, 1903 in Portland, Maine, son of Sterling Tucker Dow (a railroad executive) and Alice Gertrude Verrill Dow. He attended Phillips Exeter Academy then entered Harvard University where he received an AB in 1925, AM in 1928, and a Ph.D. in 1936. He spent 1925-1926
at Trinity College, Cambridge studying history, then returned to Harvard to work and
study with historian W. S. Ferguson. In 1931 he married Elizabeth Sanderson Flagg Dow (1905-1990) and they lived from 1931 to 1936 in Athens where he was associated with
the American School of Classical Studies. When they arrived in Athens, the American
excavations were just getting under way in the Agora, the ancient center of public
life. Dow, with the assistance of his wife, developed a superior technique for making
portable copies (called "squeezes") of inscriptions and together they made an immense
collection of both new and previously known texts.

In 1936 Sterling Dow returned to Harvard and became as an Instructor and continued
on the faculty as a member of the Departments of the Classics and of History and after
1949 he held the position of the John E. Hudson Professor of Archaeology until his
retirement in 1970. He served briefly as the Harvard University Archivist, was a founder
of the American Research Center in Egypt, the organization of Teachers of Classics
in New England, and the journal Archaeology . After his retirement from Harvard, Dow taught as a visiting professor of Greek
civilization and history at Boston College until 1977. The Dows had two children,
Sterling Dow, Jr. and Elizabeth Sterling (Mrs. Robert George Lown). Sterling Dow died
on January 9, 1995.

Consists of approximately 5,000 squeezes (impressions), most of them made by Sterling
Dow and Elizabeth Sanderson Flagg Dow, of texts inscribed on stone in Greece and elsewhere
in the Mediterranean, mostly made of double (or more) thickness filter paper; a few
made in other media. Squeezes mostly made between 1931 and 1936. Also includes: photographs
and notes made by Dow and others; a list of articles on epigraphical subjects compiled
by Dow; a sample sheet of letter-cutting; Dow's original squeeze list; list made by
R. H. Randall Jr. of the Erechtheion squeezes; a layout of a sacred calendar; and
other materials related to inscriptions.

Dow Squeeze List: contents of three looseleaf notebooks containing Dow's squeeze list,
including a list made by R. H. Randall, Jr. of the Erechtheion squeezes (IG I³ 474–476), a list of the labels on Dow's original squeeze boxes, and cross-reference
place-holders in Dow's original squeeze boxes Box 48